Stone Cold (Jesse Stone Series #4) » (Reprint)

Featuring rapid-fire dialogue and spicy characters, Robert B. Parker's books are top-shelf reading for fans of detective crime novels. His Spenser series is several titles strong and an established classic; lately Parker has raised the stakes with two additional series (one featuring private eye Sunny Randle, the other featuring police chief Jesse Stone) that may eventually rival his beloved Boston P.I.

"Parker may be the finest prose stylist in the genre."-The Denver Post

"Jesse Stone is one of Robert B. Parker's finer inventions" USA Today

In Stone Cold, Police Chief Jesse Stone has a problem. Actually, several problems: dead bodies turning up, and no clues. A man takes his dog out for a run on the beach, only to be discovered hour later-with two holes in his chest. A woman drives her Volvo to the mall to do some grocery shopping, and is found dead, and never makes it back to her house. Investigating a serial killer in an affluent suburban town is difficult, and with the added pressures from the town selectmen and media, the heat is turned up on Jesse. The harder these outside forces push against him, the more Jesse retreats into himself, convinced-despite all the odds-that it's up to him alone to stop the killing.

The Washington Post

Parker adroitly manages to keep the suspense quotient high in this tale, even though readers will be pretty secure in the knowledge that Jesse (who is after all the hero of this series) is never in any real danger. While he's playing cat and mouse with the Lincolns, he also manages to exact frontier justice from a trio of high school hoodlums who've raped a teenaged girl. To boot, Jesse even makes progress here in his relationship with his ex-wife, Jenn. The body count in Stone Cold is higher than in most of Parker's other mysteries, but then so are the therapeutic breakthroughs. — Maureen Corrigan